The radical transparency website WikiLeaks suffered a suspicious outage on December 1 for 4 hours, and many social media users quickly speculated that this situation could have been the result of another distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber strike, which has been very known this year after it attacked major websites as Twitter, Spotify and GitHub. This situation -which comes after the organization posted the release of 60,000 emails from the U.S. government contractor HBGary- started at 4:00am (GMT) and finished by 9:00am (GMT) when the website was fully restored.
A US Plan To Take Out WikiLeaks?
According to the International Business Times, a famous account linked with Anonymous explained that the 4 hours outage could have been because the Rule 41, which is the newly-passed law in the U.S. that allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and many other agencies to run hacking-based-investigations on multiple PCs with just a single warrant, which clearly could be a powerful weapon against the Julian Assange´s group. However, so far there is no evidence that relate this situation with the 4 hours outage.
Although the Rule 41 could be extremely beneficial to any kind of investigation regarding cyber threats, many believe that it could be a plan to attack WikiLeaks, after the major situation that happened some months, when the radical transparency organization stole private emails from Hillary Clinton´s campaign chairman John Podesta, and released thousands of these on its Twitter account.
The 4 Hours Outage Situation Raised Many Conspiracy Theories
Of course, this was a very delicate situation that escalated even more when the U.S. government and spy agencies blamed WikiLeaks for wanting to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, in which Donald Trump was elected as the new chief of state. According to Express, the conspiracy theories that have appeared since the 4 hours outage are just one of few that have been said through social media in the last days, to the point in which many users claimed that WikiLeaks´ Twitter account was taken by the CIA.
